What’s in a Word

Back to ground zero now, whatever that means exactly. I just looked it up. It basically refers to the spot of a nuclear destruction. We’ve heard the term used to refer to the place where the twin towers once stood in New York City. Not a nuclear blast there, but with perhaps equal devastation only in a smaller area. But another meaning is, as one can guess, square one. That’s how it’s used here.

Interesting about phrases. In the film of P. D. James’s The Murder Room, Dalgliesh’s boss calls the detective a dark horse. Dalgliesh asks, “What do people really mean by that?” While my abridged Webster doesn’t explain it, my thesaurus of phrases lists 23 synonyms for it, among them also ran, poor prospect, underdog. How wrong that boss is! Then a little flattery gets him nowhere. Dalgliesh doesn’t want the promotion; he just wants to continue as he is, solving individual cases. We readers and viewers are the winners in that debate.

Such ways in which we change or add to the language keeps English in the category of a living language. Because we do not alter the Latin language in any way today, though we do use it, Latin is called a dead language. We just couldn’t do without this corpse.

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